JERUSALEM: The World Food Programme said Monday it will end monthly assistance to 500,000 people in Gaza because of a funding shortfall, even as acute needs persist in the war-battered Palestinian territory.
With the cutbacks, 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza — still about half the population — will receive either food or cash assistance each month from the U.N. agency, in reduced amounts.
The WFP said its efforts had mitigated the effects of famine conditions in Gaza last year and warned that conditions had not improved enough to justify withdrawing aid.
"People are not safe. Airstrikes continue on a daily basis. People continue to be displaced," Shaun Hughes, the WFP country director, told AFP at the agency's office in east Jerusalem. "Almost everybody remains without a permanent home to live in. And the humanitarian conditions are brutal."
According to the latest assessments, 1.4 million people — or two-thirds of Gaza's population — remain "acutely food insecure" and need humanitarian assistance to survive, Hughes said.
In August last year, the U.N.'s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said Gaza was suffering famine conditions. The famine classification was lifted in December, two months after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire was announced. Israel has kept striking Gaza since then, vowing to kill anyone involved in the Oct. 7 attack.
Since the ceasefire, the WFP has been able to step up assistance, reaching between 1.5 million and 1.8 million people every month.
"This has been a lifeline. But now, rather than being able to sustain and scale up that assistance, we're actually having to reduce it," Hughes said. "And that's not because we don't have humanitarian access to deliver food; that's because we don't have funding."
In addition to reducing the number of recipients, the WFP has been forced to shrink rations. Families receiving food assistance will now get only one food parcel instead of two, along with a smaller bag of wheat flour, the agency said in an operational note. The 75,000 families receiving cash assistance will see their payments fall from 1,250 to 750 shekels ($400 to $240) per month.
The WFP is funded by governments and private donors. It has seen a sharp drop in resources, including after President Donald Trump returned to power and drastically slashed contributions to U.N. agencies as well as bilateral aid.
The agency says it needs about $450 million over the next six months for operations in Gaza and the West Bank, but in 2026 it has received only about half the usual financing for the Palestinian territories.
In September, the agency also halved the number of aid recipients in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, from 400,000 to 200,000.
"Now is not the time in the history of Palestine and Gaza to turn away from what is happening in Gaza," Hughes said.
The WFP says conditions have moderately improved in Gaza but noted that needs could rise again with the onset of winter.
Israel has allowed more goods into Gaza under the terms of the Trump ceasefire but still imposes heavy restrictions, turning away shipments of anything seen as having potential military use — a policy that has included blocking even prosthetic limbs, according to the United Nations.
Israel has ramped up longstanding criticism of the United Nations since the Gaza war, accusing the world body of bias and of perpetuating dependency among Palestinians.
